From the Chamber: The sense of community puts Torrington on top

By JoAnn Ryan

Published 2:00 am, Sunday, March 19, 2017

Herman Melville wrote: “We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.”

I thought about this message during the blizzard, working at home reviewing some exciting initiatives. One that deserves much attention is the Working Cities Challenge Connecticut, a groundbreaking effort led by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to support community leaders in smaller postindustrial cities.

The Working Cities Challenge was created as a new model focused on collaborative leadership and was successful in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Connecticut has been selected as the third site.

It is designed to lead smaller cities through a process that builds Cross-sector collaboration and civic engagement to solve issues impacting the lives of lower-income residents. It also encourages leaders from the public, private and nonprofit sectors to determine a complex challenge, its root cause and create a solution that will impact communities as they work through the challenge.

Torrington was among the original 16 cities and towns selected in Connecticut as a candidate for a Design Grant to support a team within the community to better understand the economic challenges. The Chamber is very proud to serve as the co-leader with the City of Torrington, headed by Mayor Elinor Carbone and Erin Wilson, Economic Development Director.

30-plus stakeholders have already met four times since October, to develop a collective understanding of our challenge and long-term goal. In February, some of our team met in Hartford with a panel of experts from the Boston Federal Reserve to present our case.

We had uncovered facts and statistics that revealed a little-known secret about Torrington. We are the only “Micropolitan” area in Connecticut and among the top 3 in the United States. This means that Torrington contains an urban core of at least 10,000 people but less than 50,000 serving a population of over 180,000 residents.

Our challenge is based on the following:

We are a distressed municipality that supports an entire region.

We have the fastest aging population in the state of Connecticut county wide along with a declining student enrollment and loss of millennials.

We need to attract and retain a younger workforce.

The representatives who presented our case to the jury included:

Erin Wilson, co-leader, Economic Development Director for Torrington

Owen Quinn, Executive Director of the NW CT United Way, former Mayor of Torrington

Maria Gonzalez, New Opportunities Family Development Center Manager and Liaison for the Hispanic Community

Denise Clemons, Superintendent of Torrington School System

Dr. Michael Rooke, President of Northwestern Connecticut Community College

Lance Boynton, Chair of the Chamber’s Manufacturing Coalition, Owner of a Lean Manufacturing Consulting Company

Dr. Richard Scaldini, Strategic Planning Consultant, former college president and investment banker

JoAnn Ryan, President & CEO of the Northwest Connecticut Chamber of Commerce

We were recently notified that Torrington was among the top ten to be selected for the Design Phase of the Working Cities Challenge.

The key element that rose to the top: The “sense of community” among the strong team of leaders engaged in this challenge.

There is much more to do and we will be reaching out to you, so please stay tuned.

JoAnn Ryan is President of the NW CT Chamber of Commerce. You can reach her by email at: joann@nwctchamberofcommerce.org